SOHO is safe
Luckily, SOHO drifted back into sunlight long enough to recharge its solar cells for communications with Earth, and in the past month the fuel has been heated from -100 C to 10 C. Engineers had to be ...
European radio astronomers silence satellites
Signals produced by the satellites are over a 100 times stronger than the radio sources studied by astronomers. Under the new agreement, European radio astronomers will get 24 hours of ‘unpollut...
New clues to the left-handed origins of life
Fred Hoyle was the first to suggest that organic molecules developed in outer space and then fell to the earth, but it was not until the discovery of large quantities of left-handed amino acids in a m...
‘Idle’ machines look for ET
In the past similar approaches have been used to crack encryption codes or calculate the largest prime number, but this is the first time such a scheme has been used for analysing raw scientific data....
First American in space dies
Shepard was born in East Derry, New Hampshire, on November 18, 1923, and received a Bachelor of Science degree from the US Naval Academy in 1944. Before joining NASA, he flew as a Navy pilot. Shepard ...
Astronomers catch ‘planet-mania’
Greaves and colleagues used the SCUBA instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to look at the dust around Epsilon Eridani. SCUBA operates at submillimetre wavelengths, where the glare...
ESA demands new money
Antonio Rodota, ESA’s director general, has been campaigning to increase the amount of industrial involvement in the space agency. However it has been clear for many months that there would be s...
Sloan Survey sees first light
The 2.5 m Sloan telescope is based at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The telescope has an unusually wide field of view and one of the most advanced digital cameras ever built. The camera cons...
South Africa approves new telescope
Astronomers involved with the project hope to use a lightweight multi-segment design similar to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas, which cost only about 20 per cent of what it would cost to bu...
Has Hubble photographed an extrasolar planet?
Terebey and colleagues believe that the new planet was in orbit around two stars – TMR-1A and -1B – before it was ejected by a gravitational slingshot mechanism. The planet then created a ...
